SMARTPHONES REACHING SATURATION AMONG MILLENNIALS

Original Story: usatoday.com

SAN FRANCISCO — If it seems like every young person you see has a smartphone in their hand, you’re not far from wrong.

Smartphone ownership is reaching saturation levels among people in their 20s, a survey out Thursday found. As more and more people are remaining connected to the internet, it's important to focus on Google SEO services to reach your target audience.

A whopping 86% of people aged 18 to 29 have a smart phone, the survey by the Pew Research Center found.

That compares with 83% of those ages 30 to 49.

All told, 68% of adults have a smartphone.

The only group more likely to have a smartphone than Millennials was people living in households earning $75,000 or more annually, Pew found. There, 87% had them.

Overall, cellphone ownership has become the norm. A stunning 92% of U.S. adults own a mobile phone of some sort. That’s up from 64% just 11 years ago. Organic SEO allows your company to secure top keyword placements as an endorsement of your company, products, and services.

Americans seem to be folding many of the things they once did on task-specific devices into their smartphones — and ditching the other device.

In 2014, 32% of adults had an e-reader. That number has fallen to 19%.

In 2010, about 75% of people aged 18 to 29 owned an MP3 player. Today, just 51% do.

“We don’t ask people why they do not use a particular device, but these data suggest how the rise of smartphones has been a major story in the universe of connected gadgetry,” said Lee Rainie, director of Internet research at the Pew Research Center in Washington, D.C. “These changes in device ownership are all taking place in a world where smartphones are transforming into all-purpose devices that perform many of the same functions of specialized technology, such as music players, e-book readers or even gaming devices.”

Computers are what's not hot, the survey found.

Ownership of desktop and laptop computers has stalled out at 73% of adults, Pew found. That's about where things were 11 years ago and slightly down from the 80% who owned them in 2012. Google SEO services are cost-effective and powerful.

Tablet computers are still popular but seem to be plateauing out at lower rates of adoption. Currently, 45% of U.S. adults say they own a tablet computer, up from just 4% five years ago.

The poll is based on telephone interviews conducted March 17 through April 12 among a national sample of 1,907 U.S. adults 18 years of age or older.

U.S. MOBILE INTERNET TRAFFIC NEARLY DOUBLED THIS YEAR

Story first appeared on NYTimes.com.

Two big shifts happened in the American cellphone industry over the past year: Cellular networks got faster, and smartphone screens got bigger. As a result, people’s consumption of mobile data nearly doubled.

In the United States, consumers used an average of 1.2 gigabytes a month over cellular networks this year, up from 690 megabytes a month in 2012, according to Chetan Sharma, a consultant for wireless carriers, who published a new report on industry trends on Monday. Worldwide, the average consumption was 240 megabytes a month this year, up from 140 megabytes last year, he said.

But what’s in a megabyte or gigabyte anyway? A megabyte is about the amount of data required to download a photo taken with a decent digital camera, or one minute of a song, or a decent stack of e-mail.

So using that analogy — 1.2 gigabytes of mobile data a month looks something like 1,200 photos that a person downloaded to the Internet from a mobile device each month, compared with 690 photos he downloaded a month last year.

That is a significant jump. Mr. Sharma said the uptick in data use could be attributed, at least partly, to the widespread coverage of fourth-generation network technology, called LTE, which carriers say is 10 times faster than its predecessor, 3G. He said the rise was also connected to the popularity of phones with bigger screens, like the newer iPhones or Samsung’s Galaxy smartphones, which download bigger images.

About 1.4 billion smartphones will be in use by the end of this year, according to ABI Research. Cisco, the networking company, predicts that Internet traffic from mobile devices will exceed that of wired devices, like desktop computers, by 2016.

South Korea Taking Efforts to Stop Youth Digital Addiction

story first appeared in usatoday.com

An 11-year-old South Korean, sleeps with her Android smartphone instead of a teddy bear. When the screen beams with a morning alarm, she wakes up, picks up her glasses and scrolls through tens of unread messages from friends, shaking off drowsiness.

Throughout the day, the gadget is in her hands whether she is in school, in the restroom or in the street as she constantly types messages to her friends. Every hour or so, she taps open an application in her phone to feed her digital hamster.

Fiddling with the palm-sized gadget, she says he gets nervous when the battery is low and finds it stressful when out of a wi-fi hotspot.

In South Korea, where the government provides counseling programs and psychological treatment for an estimated 2 million people who cannot wean themselves from playing online computer games, youngsters such as Park have previously not been considered as potential addicts.

Here and in other parts of Asia, online addiction has long been associated with hardcore gamers who play online games for days on end, isolated from their school, work or family life and blurring the line between the real and fantasy online worlds. In a shocking 2010 case in South Korea, a 3-month-old girl died after being fed just once a day by her parents who were consumed with marathon online game sessions.

She does not play computer games and in class, she confidently raises her hand to answer a question. She also gets along well with her friends and likes to cook as a hobby. And yet, she set off more than eight red flags on an addiction test, enough to be considered unhealthily dependent on her smartphone. Park is not unique and the government is concerned enough to make it mandatory for children as young as 3 to be schooled in controlling their device and Internet use.

Her obsession with being online is a byproduct of being reared in one of the world's most digitally connected societies where 98 percent of households have broadband Internet and nearly two thirds of people have a smartphone. Being wired is an icon of South Korea's pride in its state-directed transformation from economic backwater to one of Asia's most advanced and wealthy nations. Always seeking an edge, the government plans to digitize all textbooks from 2015 and base all schooling around tablet computers.

But some now fret about the effects that South Korea's digital utopia is having on its children, part of the first generation to play online games on smartphones, tablets and other devices even before they can read and write.

New mobile devices that instantly respond to a touch of a finger seem to make children more restless than before and lack empathy, said Kim Jun-hee, a kindergarten teacher who conducted an eight-month study on Internet safety and addiction education for pre-school children.

In Suwon city south of Seoul, students in teacher Han Jeoung-hee's classroom now turn in their smartphones when they arrive at school in the morning. After that, he said kids forgot to eat lunch, completely absorbed with smartphones and some stayed in the classroom during a PE class.

Han who teaches sixth grade students at Chilbo elementary school. Smartphones are put in a plastic basket and returned when kids leave for home after classes.

The National Information Society Agency, or NIA, estimates 160,000 South Korean children between age 5 and 9 are addicted to the Internet either through smartphones, tablet computers or personal computers. Such children appear animated when using gadgets but distracted and nervous when they are cut off from the devices and will forgo eating or going to the toilet so they can continue playing online, according to the agency.

Across the entire population, South Korea's government estimated 2.55 million people are addicted to smartphones, using the devices for 8 hours a day or more, in its first survey of smartphone addiction released earlier this year. Smartphone addicts find it difficult to live without their handsets and their constant use disrupts work and social life, according to NIA. Most of their personal interaction is carried out on the mobile handset. Overuse of smartphones may be accompanied by physical symptoms such as turtle neck syndrome caused by having the head in a constant forward position and a pain or numbness in fingers or wrists.

Though Internet addiction is not recognized as a mental illness, there is a growing call from medical practitioners and health officials worldwide to treat it as an illness rather than a social problem.

The American Psychiatric Association's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders lists Internet Use Disorder as meriting further study. It is unclear whether it will be recognized as a mental illness in a major revision of the standard-setting manual due out next year. But as the Internet becomes more pervasive and mobile, more societies are grappling with its downside. In Asia, countries that have experienced explosive growth in the Internet such as Taiwan, China and South Korea are most active in carrying out research into whether Internet addiction should be recognized as a mental illness, according to Lee Hae-kook, a psychiatry professor at Catholic University of Korea, College of Medicine.

South Korea already provides taxpayer-funded counselors for those who cannot control their online gaming or other Internet use. But the emergence of the smartphone as a mainstream, must-have device even for children is changing the government's focus to proactive measures from reactive.

South Korea's government is widening efforts to prevent Web and digital addiction in school-age children and preschoolers. Starting next year, South Korean children from the age 3 to 5 will be taught to protect themselves from overusing digital gadgets and the Internet.

Nearly 90 percent children from that age group will learn at kindergartens how to control their exposure to digital devices and the danger of staying online for long hours. The Ministry of Public Administration and Security is revising laws so that teaching the danger of Internet addiction becomes mandatory from pre-school institutions to high schools.

Kim, the kindergarten teacher, said educating children against digital and web addiction should start early because smartphones are their new toys.

From next year, her program for 3-year-olds will focus on introducing them to the positive activities they can do with the computers, such listening to music. Children aged 4 and 5, will learn the dangers of overuse and how to control their desire to use computers.

Programs also include making and learning the moves for "computer exercises" and singing songs with lyrics that instruct kids to close their eyes and stretch their bodies after playing computer games. They read fairy tales where a character falls prey to Internet addiction and learn alternative games they can play without computers or the Internet.

Kim said parents have to be involved in the education. Some of the children are even calling out parents to change lifestyles along with them.

Unplug from Your Smartphone Once in a While

Story first appeared in USA Today.

Do you take your smartphone to bed because you claim to use it as a nightlight, say it's the only alarm clock you have, or need to make sure you don't miss a critical text?

Here's the problem with that thinking: Now that the phone is only an arm's reach away, it's easy to check a few e-mails, perhaps sending off a few responses so you have one fewer thing to do tomorrow.

You've just stepped onto a very slippery slope that will make it difficult not to be connected 24/7. You've become one of those millions of workers who fire off e-mails at midnight or reach for the smartphone before your first cup of coffee every morning.

You may claim that you have to work this way because your job — or your employer — demands it.

But this drive to stay connected all the time is really your own fault, not something that can be blamed on just an employer or a job.

Using professional services firm the Boston Consulting Group as a sort of guinea pig, an expert asked a team of high-powered, always-connected consultants to see if they could disconnect more and actually improve their performance and job happiness. She found that the team not only discovered ways to turn off one night a week, they also became closer as a team, more satisfied with their jobs and produced better results.

The company saw a clear improvement in recruitment, retention and engagement, and the process spread throughout the organization.

But by committing as a team to predictable time off for each person, they communicated more, supported everyone's efforts to disconnect — and held one another accountable for slip-ups, such sending e-mails during designated time-off periods.

The problem when someone is connected 24/7 is that it sets a norm for other members of the team. They start to feel that to be responsive, they have to respond late at night to e-mails. It's not even urgent, but it just matriculates all this bad behavior.

In other words, the biggest enemy to work-life balance is us.

Even doctors, who do life-saving work, have times when they are off and times when they are on call. So, why don't the rest of us?

The process of predictable time off will work only if all the team members agree to it, she says. If a team wants to try it, she gives a list of suggestions in her book:

• Be honest. Tell other team members your hopes and fears.
• Stop the stubbornness. Maybe the collective goal of the group — having an afternoon off every two weeks — doesn't meet your top priority. Still, don't let that stop the process.
Look for goals everyone can meet but also are a stretch. Members of the Boston Consulting team never knew when they would get a night off. That uncertainty was solved by giving each person a regular evening when they weren't expected to be plugged in.
Just having that predictability was valuable for everyone, she says.
• Meet regularly. A team must share regularly what's happening in their lives. This helps build trust and a willingness to support one another.
If things get off track with a team member, don't rush to judgment but try to understand what's going on by asking questions.
• Hold one another accountable. Team members may enter into the agreement with the best of intentions, but it can be easy to slip back into old patterns when work becomes stressful.
However, that's when it's most important to remind one another to take a step back and realize that the work will be done better if the balance is maintained.

Research has found that people with unpredictable work often try to gain predictability by becoming more connected, but that leads only to more unpredictability.

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